


Apples and Oranges Too

by drawlight



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Cheating, Drabble, F/F, Falling In Love, Forbidden Love, Infidelity, Love, Love Confessions, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 21:38:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18507586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: You’re trouble, Hermione thinks. You’ve always been trouble. That’s the trouble with you.





	Apples and Oranges Too

**Author's Note:**

> To everyone I know, who I am at least half in-love with.

_You’re trouble,_  Hermione thinks.  _You’ve always been trouble. That’s the trouble with you._

“I want to come in.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“He’s asleep in front of the telly.”

“We won’t make a sound.”

Hermione backs away from the door. She has never been able to say no to the other woman. All these books, her three degrees, a goddamn Order of Merlin on the wall. For what? You cannot teach a heart. They cannot scribble in the bubbles of a Scantron test, evaluate A, B, and C. Our wretched holdover hearts, left from an earlier, more primitive time, falling in love indiscriminately.

“Be quiet,” Hermione whispers.

“I always am,” Ginny pulls the tie from her hair. Yes, hair like the fruit in the bowl, the color of navel oranges and persimmons. Not the color of the Braeburn apples that Ron prefers, red as iron oxide. Hermione is always critical of the word _red-haired,_ there is no red in Ginny, no red in her hair. It is like rust and carrots, autumn leaves, pumpkins. There is no red in her but her blood. (Hermione loves that too.)

 

* * *

 

 

In the bedroom, they shut the door, careful of the loud latch. She pushes Ginny up against the plaster wall, the eggshell paint matte and gripping at her mohair sweater.

“Where’s Harry?”

“He’s at an awards ceremony.”

One hand already snaking up the soft, bone-pale stomach, the familiar solar plexus (they have no time). Comes to rest on the hollow space of the chest, between the tidal lock breasts. Yes, she likes it there best, strangely non-sexual yet it is the place she is closest to the heart. There is no fat there, in the center of the breastbone. When she touches Ginny there, it is only a bit of skin and bone, below there, her heart.

“I love you,” Ginny tucks Hermione’s oak-tree hair back, back behind an ear. Whispers it right into the tunnel, like an echo tossed into a hallway. It bounces, rattles around.

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Don’t start,” Ginny sighs, “You haven’t left your husband either.” Yes, she is being unfair. That’s the trouble with learning about love from books. We assume it is a well-ticketed system. Yes, yes, one love at a time. Like seeing a movie, renting a car. Bring it back if you must and you can have another. It is not like that at all, the heart is a funny thing. It can fall in love with as many as it chooses. (Worst part, it can stay there too.) _I love you, yes, yes, yes. I cannot breathe without you. You are my lungs. He is my bones, my skeletal system. I would collapse without him._

“Get over here then. Mind the laundry there.”

“Is this his shirt?” Ginny asks, pulling it off of the pillow.

“Yes.” (She drops it on the floor.)

God, yes, skin against skin, this riot of ache. _I need you._ It doesn’t make sense to need ourselves. Hermione understands everything, just her and her microscope, but she cannot pull her own want out and put it on a glass slide, cannot dissect it on a stainless steel table. _Is it just for you? Your mind, the wild way you will skinny dip without a moment’s thought? The way you curl up in the corners of couches with a book? I wanted you from the start._ Yes, that opal skin, hair like traffic cones.

One hand over the ribs, the swells and sinks of the stomach, the hips, the delta between the thighs. Soft there, salty as the sea. Have you ever knocked back an oyster? Yes, she is briny and sharp as an oyster, soft as the center (which has never seen the sun). _How long has it been since you made love to him?_ She hopes it has been months, years perhaps. Yes, we might share ourselves but we do not want to share that which we love. It is different. We keep score, we know exactly how much of ourselves have been given, how much has been held back. Yes, yes, the monthly budget, expense receipts. _I need you._

Tonight, they must be quiet. Must be careful. They’ve cast a silencing charm but when Ginny comes, bucking up on the bed and clenching her thighs around Hermione’s sea-diving head, Hermione shoves her hand over the other’s mouth anyway. She likes the way it feels, teeth and spit, hot breath. She cannot read lips by touch but she knows the feel of her name written against the palm of her hand.

In after, tracing gooseflesh skin and writing psalms and poetry on ribs, on calves, their wingless backs, Hermione wonders about similarities and differences. With Ron, she is always finding the separations. She marvels at his hairy calves, his wide shoulders, his red dowsing-rod cock. With Ginny, the ache is the same yet different. Flour-cup breasts in their simple bra, the narrow waist, the serpentine curve of her hip. Like and unlike Hermione. She marvels that Ginny is a woman, yet it is strangely easier to sink past that, to think of only blood and bone and breath. Just our frail human bodies, our piles of atoms struggling to understand. Stardust.

“When you come tomorrow, bring oranges.”

“Alright, do you need anything else?”

“No,” Ginny breathes, her hands buried in the wild dark hair, wrapping around Hermione’s neck. They smell like swimmers, caked with salt. Metallic with sweat like a coin pile, a puddle of blood.

“Go,” she says, “Before I throw you into the Floo.”

 _Kiss me first._ And yes, yes, those fingers at the jaw, the lift of the head. _We should not._ Why is a kiss the most intimate? We can fuck, make love, bare these hidden pieces of ourselves? But the most revealing thing of all comes from our always-seen mouths. Yes, yes, this here, mouth to mouth, heaving and clinging to each other, these wild heartbeats attached at the lip. _I love you._

Yes, don’t say it unless you can do something about it.

 

Art by likelightinglass.

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for the oranges motif comes from Jeanette Winterson.


End file.
